Finalists - Round 5

For the 5th round of the Prototype Fund we have picked an additional thematic focus in addition to the four basic pillars of the program, Civic Tech, Data Literacy, Data Security and Software Infrastructure:

New technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning are on everyone’s lips – but they are not (yet) in our hands. With the focus of the 5th cohort, we wanted to encourage more people to help shape new technologies ™ and thus our future.
Together, we seek to investigate what opportunities emergent technological developments offer society. How much of it is hype, what are the risks, how can we gain a better insight into the emergence of technologies, influence and co-develop them?

Cypherlock is an meta-encryption application for hard disks that is aimed especially at investigative journalists.

Datenklaus

Nastasja Krohe
, Annemarie Hobach
, Julian Dehm
#Data Literacy

Datenklaus empowers students to handle data responsibly. The app provides playful access to digital tracks and their interpretability by third parties.

Emergency Warning System for Open Source Mobile Communication

Harald Welte
#Infrastructure

Emergency warning systems (e.g. for natural disasters) are often based on mobile communication and usually use Cell Broadcast SMS as transport technology. For OS mobile communication, only rudimentary SMSBC support exists so far – this needs to be implemented to be able to connect OSMOCOM projects to emergency warning systems.

EnergyModels

Jonas Hörsch
#Data Literacy

EnergyModels is a framework to model and analyze the operation of energy systems on our way to decarbonization.

Eye Skills at Home

Thomas Ben Senior
#Civic Tech

Eye Skills is an open source virtual reality that enables people with strabismus to activate their suppressed eye and learn to use both eyes in a coordinated way.

Filtering Hate Speech

Johannes Filter
#Data Literacy

A website that contains an interactive component in addition to graphics and explanatory texts explains how machine learning algorithms are trained, and how ML-assignments work in the context of Hate Speech.

Infrastructure for Cashless Payments without Surveillance

Florian Dold
#Infrastructure

GNU Taler is a free online payment system that protects the privacy of customers while making the income of traders available to accountants. This makes illegal activities such as tax evasion or trading of illegal goods more difficult.

Manipulation

Katharina Rasch
#Data Literacy

The aim of the project is to make standard applications of artificial intelligence in the field of image manipulation comprehensible and tools and information accessible for this purpose.

microG

Marvin Wißfeld
#Infrastructure

microG enables the use of Android apps without integration of Google Play services and thus contributes to the protection of privacy.

Mietenwatch

Jakob Simmer
#Civic Tech

Mietenwatch (i.e. Rent Watch) evaluates publicly accessible data from real estate platforms to gain new insights in the housing situation. Users get access to a more detailed picture of rent developments.

ML-based Translation for LibreOffice Writer

Thomas Viehmann
#Infrastructure

The project develops a machine learning-based translation application for LibreOffice. With this application, it is possible to have sentences, paragraphs or an entire document automatically translated from one language into another with a simple click.

Open Source Push Service for Android Apps

Marcus Hoffmann
#Infrastructure

So far, the only way to send push notifications to mobile apps is to use either Google’s or Apple’s push services. This project wants to provide a data-saving open source alternative.

Photownica

Robert Buchholz
#Infrastructure

Photownica is a tool to search your pictures without cloud services. Private photos are indexed using artificial intelligence methods without having to leave the user’s device.

Platform for Transcriptions

Matthias Hannich
#Civic Tech

A platform for transcribing voice recordings from podcasts, web radios and other media products, etc.

Portable Firewall for QubesOS

Stefanie Schirmer
#Data Security

The aim of the project is to develop a lightweight firewall for QubesOS based on MirageOS. A firewall prohibits unauthorized access to network communication via filter rules.

Robust OpenVPN Client With Low Use of Resources

Hannes Mehnert
#Data Security

VPN Client is a cryptographically reliable and easy-to-use OpenVPN implementation based on the MirageOS kernel, which i. a. enables collaborative work from different locations via secure connection.

The Open Green Web

Chris Adams
#Civic Tech

The aim of Open Green Web is to accelerate the transition of the grid to green energy by providing information on which web services already operate on renewables.

Undo Ransomware

Matthias Held
, Matthias Fratz
#Data Security

Undo Ransomware is a cloud-based application that complements the existing Nextcloud Ransomware Recovery app with a machine learning approach. Content that has been encrypted during an attack should be recoverable more easily from previously saved versions.

VCAT

Adam Harvey
#Civic Tech

VCAT is a tool set for open source investigations in human rights that makes use of computer vision and machine learning. The extension of VFrame consists of a search platform, a collaborative web-based annotation tool and 3D-modelled synthetic data sets for training purposes.

Your Voice

Thomas Werkmeister
#Data Literacy

Your Voice is an interactive website that brings to life a range of new technologies and applications related to the human voice.